To be competitive in the market, it is important for a business to have an accurate skills inventory. That is, it is important for the business to accurately keep track of all of the available skill resources the business has at its disposal. Furthermore, because the acquisition of new skills as well as the expansion of existing skills for a given individual is constantly changing, for example, as individuals gain experience with respect to different tasks, it is increasingly more important for the business to be cognizant of its available skills. The cost of using inaccurate skills data can be very high and potentially lead to less efficient operation of the business, low customer satisfaction, erroneous site selection to deliver a service, etc.
Also, skills are a unit of measure by which services deals are costed and priced. Accordingly, maintaining accurate skills data is non-trivial. In accordance with at least some known related art methodology, skills databases are deterministically populated using an employee's “claimed” skills, a practice that does not reflect the “true” skill value. Also, as employees evolve in their job, the skills may not be updated to reflect the evolving skill value.
FIG. 2 illustrates a related art system where records 200 for each employee in a business are stored in a skills inventory database 100. Each of these records comprises information related to what skills the particular employee has. For example, resumes 300 provided by the employees indicate particular skills the employees have. Using a skills specification (not shown) to determine what data is important/relevant, one of the records 400 corresponding to a particular employee might include data informing that this employee has five years experience with Oracle, ten years of experience using the SAP application and four years of experience with the AIX operating system.
Although this information is beneficial to a degree, it is not completely accurate. For example, the information provided is done so by the employee and may not reflect the actual proficiency this employee has attained regarding the specified skills. Instead, the data only indicates years of experience, which does not always reflect an accurate level of proficiency. Further, the data provided regarding the number of years is very discrete. That is, it is provided in one year increments. It is unlikely that the employee has exactly five, ten and four years, respectively, experience with each of the skills. It is more likely that the respective amount of experience for each skill includes a partial year.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method and a system for accurately assessing and storing the skills available to a business with respect to each employee and other human resources available.